The Ark Centre is a purpose-built therapy centre in Chelmsford, Essex offering individualised, early intervention therapy for children with autism and/or social communication difficulties.

We are Ofsted registered and our Occupational and Speech and Language therapists are registered with the HCPC. The Ark opened in June 2015 and we remain the only multidisciplinary early intervention centre for children with autism in Essex.

Our programmes are tailored to each child and devised by our experienced team of Behaviour, Speech and Language and Occupational Therapists. Each programme is mainly delivered on a one-to-one basis, following the principles of Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA), to bring about meaningful and positive changes in children’s behaviour and well-being. All programmes are supervised by a BCBA qualified consultant.

Each day the centre hosts two, 3-hour sessions. The morning sessions are from 9.30am to 12.30pm and the afternoon sessions are from 1.30pm to 4.30pm. Sessions run Monday-Friday for 41 weeks of the year. Each session has a maximum of 8 children present. We require that each child attends a minimum of 4 sessions per week to ensure they progress.

For the children that attend The Ark Centre we are able to share our expertise and offer advice to families of children, enabling family members to feel comfortable and confident in the support they are providing their children at home and outside of the centre. Key to the success of any programme is the generalisation of functional skills. To achieve this, partnership working with parents / carers is crucial.

The Ark Centre Charity is always fundraising to maintain the subsidised fee rates at the centre and is working on increasing our capacity to accommodate more children and reduce the length of our waiting list.

If you would like to donate to The Ark Centre Charity, please visit our donations page, or see our events information for how to be involved in future fundraising activities.

“I cannot recommend The Ark Centre enough. The team of therapists that they have on board are far more superior than any others that I have come across. They are very accurate and thorough in identifying the key areas that our son required intervention and support in, and quickly put a programme in place to assist him with this.

My son has made amazing progress since attending The Ark, more that we could ever have imagined. His quality of life is now so much better and he is becoming more functional and social with his peers, two areas which we saw little or no progress in before starting The Ark Centre.” – Chris O’Donoghue